Already, the setup for a thriller of this sort is delicious, but De Palma has more than one surprise up his sleeve. Defense Secretary amidst the high-stakes throes of the boxing match. sounds like a nice night for an assassination with a side dish of collusion, no? Cover-ups and double-crosses become the name of the game in Snake Eyes after an unseen gunman proceeds to shoot and kill the U.S. The crowd is fired up, the place is alive with bloodlust. Snake Eyes isn’t a reinvention of the wheel, or even of De Palma’s usual playbook: as usual, he is doing Hitchcock one better, reveling in the suspense and skeeziness and explosive visual fireworks that this genre affords its practitioners. We have seen many instances of poorly-reviewed films that would go on to be reappraised as good or even great in the years/decades following their release ( Richard Kelly’s infamously maligned Southland Tales is only one of a few examples of this). ![]() Of course, reviews are meant to be taken within the context of the time in which they were published. ![]() RELATED: How 'Face/Off' Obliterates the Line Between Good and Bad In his slam of a review, Roger Ebert called Snake Eyes “the worst kind of bad film: the kind that gets you all worked up and then lets you down, instead of just being lousy from the first shot.” Elsewhere, Kenneth Turan, writing for the Los Angeles Times, labeled the movie “ coarse and undernourished” as an exercise in drama. The fact that Snake Eyes doesn’t labor under the pretense of being high art, ironically, is ultimately made it easier for critics to attack it. While we would never claim Snake Eyes to be Top 5 De Palma, watching the movie against the backdrop of today’s weightlessly anemic mainstream thrillers makes it much easier to appreciate Snake Eyes’ formal inventiveness, the heedless zeal of its filmmaking style, and Cage’s hellacious, go-for-broke lead performance. ![]() You’re more likely to get an intersection of answers that encompasses one or more of the following: Carrie, Scarface, The Untouchables, etc. Ask your average film-lover what their favorite De Palma movie happens to be, and we doubt very many people would say Snake Eyes. One movie that doesn’t quite get the love it deserves in this regard is Snake Eyes, in which Cage goes fully wacky for the legendary director Brian De Palma. To be sure, Cage’s run of thrillers and action flicks in the '90s is the stuff of legend: The Rock, in which Cage squares off with Sean Connery and Ed Harris, is rightly recognized as a career highlight of director Michael Bay, while the hyper-adrenalized Con Air remains a staple of vintage meathead-movie sleaze. Nicolas Cage has maneuvered through a multitude of phases in what is now a decades-spanning career: he’s been a character actor, a leading man, an action star, a living meme, and, particularly in the last few years, an artist reborn.
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